Many have predicted the End Times

Updated 11:37 pm, Thursday, May 19, 2011

There have been hundreds of predictions of the Second Coming, the End Times and the rapture over the last 2,000 years. Here are some of the more recent ones:

1814: Joanna Southcott of Gittisham, in Devon, England, predicts that she will give birth to a new messiah on Oct. 19. She believes that she is the woman mentioned in Revelation 12: 1-6. Southcott was 64 at the time, and she died two months later. She is said to have more than 50,000 followers who called themselves Southcottians.

1835-91: Mormon founder Joseph Smith announces in February 1835 that he had spoken to God, and was told that Christ would return sometime in the next 56 years, after which the End Times would begin.

1844: William Miller, a Baptist preacher, determines after studying the book of Daniel that Christ would return to Earth on Oct. 22, 1844, at midnight. Thousands of New Englanders, many of whom gave away their possessions, took to the hills expecting to ascend to heaven in the rapture. After Christ fails to appear, they returned to their homes, humiliated. The event later became known as the Great Disappointment.

1914: The Jehovah's Witnesses, then called Zion's Watch Tower Tract Society, believe that the outbreak of World War I will trigger the Second Coming.

1973: David Berg, founder of the Children of God, predicted that the U.S. would suffer earthquakes and other calamities in January 1974 caused by comet Kohoutek.

1976: Australian house painter John Nash predicts that Adelaide would be wiped out in an earthquake and tidal wave precisely at noon on Jan. 19. Hundreds of people flee inland. Even the BBC sends a TV crew to cover the event live, which never materializes.

1997: In California, 21 women and 18 men, all followers of the Heaven's Gate cult, commit suicide over three days beginning on March 23. The Heaven's Gate followers subscribed to a belief that combined an interpretation of the Book of Revelations with UFO visitations. They believed that they had to kill themselves to attain the "next level."